And Life Goes On
is the middle film of a trilogy, preceded by
Where Is the Friend's Home?
and followed by
Through the Olive Trees.
The three films (rightly regarded as among the great achievements of
contemporary world cinema) are intricately interconnected; only the first
might be considered self-sufficient. Briefly,
Where Is the Friend's Home?
is a straightforward neo-realist film about the predicament of two small
boys in an adult world too preoccupied with its own problems to listen to
children.
And Life Goes On
is set in the same district of Iran a year or so later: the great
earthquake has intervened, and the director of the first film (played by
an actor, and never named within the film) journeys by car with his young
son to find out whether the two children who acted the main roles in the
previous film have survived.
Through the Olive Trees
carries the self-reflexiveness even further, at times into quite dizzying
convolutions: Kiarostami (played this time by a different actor, though
now named) returns again to the area to make a film about the filming of
And Life Goes On
, partly involving the reconstruction of scenes from that film; at one
point, then, we have Kiarostami himself (off screen) directing an actor
playing Kiarostami directing the actor who played him in
And Life Goes On.
With this in mind, it may seem paradoxical to add that the most obvious
characteristic of Kiarostami's films is their simplicity. The
complications are in the material, never in its filmic realization. If one
also wishes to describe his filmmaking as virtuoso, that is again not
really a contradiction: the music of Mozart (with which
Kiarostami's work, in its emotional delicacy and complexity, might
be felt to have an affinity) might also be described as at once simple and
virtuosic. Consider, for example, the now famous last shots of both
And Life Goes On
and
Through the Olive Trees
, the moments often referred to as "epiphanies": what could
be simpler than simply placing the camera in the necessary viewing
position and refusing to move it or cut throughout a lengthy action shown
in extreme long-shot? And the action itself is as simple as possible: a
car trying to climb a steep hill, a young man running to catch up with the
woman he loves to propose one last time. Yet the suspense is
edge-of-your-seat, the end a whole new beginning, such is the emotional
investment asked of the spectator.

Kiarostami's aesthetic roots are in Italian neo-realism (one notes
a particular affinity with the greatest of the neo-realists, making it
especially appropriate that he was given the Rossellini prize at an
Italian film festival). The self-reflexivity comes perhaps from the French
New Wave, especially Godard, though it seems so natural to Kiarostami, to
arise so logically from his work, that one wonders whether he invented it
independently.
Where Is the Friend's Home?
never calls its (fictional) reality into question.
And Life Goes On
remains faithful to the basic neo-realist principles, with everything
shot on location using non-professional actors ("real
people"), yet it is also the interrogation of neo-realism: the
figure of the filmmaker now appears in the film, the previous film is
revealed
as
a film, a fiction, and the "real people" were in fact
acting: one of them, encountered en route, complains that Kiarostami made
him dress and behave quite differently from his everyday self. We are of
course free to ask whether Kiarostami
told
him to say this, especially in retrospect from
Through the Olive Trees
, in which we see the director insist (against all odds) that the
recalcitrant actors speak the lines they have been given.

Yet the levels never cancel each other out. If we are aware of a
dislocation between fiction and reality, we are also constantly aware

And Life Goes On

of their close relationship. As the director drives through devastated
landscapes, we know that the rubble is real, that the earthquake was a
fact, that the two boys could have died, even while we know that we are
watching a carefully constructed film and are at liberty to reflect that
Kiarostami must already have known whether they were alive or not. We care
about finding the boys because we know they are "real" boys
from that area, but also because they were the
characters
from the previous film (which is, after all, how we know them), still
bearing their (fictional) emotional weight. Kiarostami demonstrates that
it is possible to be completely honest about the fabricated nature of
filmmaking (
all
filmmaking, even documentary) without jeopardizing the possibility of the
emotional involvement we look for in fiction. The self-reflexivity
functions more as counterpoint than as contradiction.

—Robin Wood

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